This film from director Bernard Rose (who would later helm Candyman
and Immortal Beloved) is a delightfully scary look at the blending
of dreams and reality. Anna (Charlotte Burke) is an eleven-year-old girl who
enjoys drawing. During a class one day, she produces a picture of an amorphic
house with large, forbidding rocks (gravestones?) in the front yard. After
an unfortunate incident, she dreams that she wakes up in the field in front
of the house that she has drawn. She runs to it and calls out for someone
to come out. No one answers and she wakes up.

Noting the similarities between the houses, she gets the idea
to draw a sad-looking boy in its top-floor window. In her next dream, she
calls out and a sad-looking boy named Marc (Elliott
Spiers) peers out of an upper window. She calls for him to come down but he
says he can't as there are no stairs.

Then she takes the time to design a full floor plan and upon
her return is able to go inside, but now the boy can't walk because she didn't
draw him legs. Her attempt to remedy this is the first time she begins to
realize that not everything is going to be malleable in this picture. Still,
as she is now ill and spending a lot of time in bed, she continues to dream,
getting more and more involved until, at a pivotal point, she draws her father
into the picture, then, dissatisfied with the image, angrily scratches him
out.

From a screenplay by Matthew Jacobs (based on Catherine Storr's
novel Marianne Dreams), director Rose draws us into Anna's fantasy
world. Production designer Gemma Jackson deserves a lot of the credit with
her design of the "paperhouse" and its environs, particularly the
use of darks and grays. The line between reality and the dream world is always
clear, even when Anna's doctor mysteriously mentions another patient of hers
-- a paralyzed boy named Marc.

The story is sufficiently creepy, never crossing the line into
pure horror, but always treading the darker areas of dream fantasy. Burke's
performance as Anna is so pure and natural -- childlike without being childish
-- that it is a pity that she has done no more film work. And although I did
not feel that Glenne Headly was sufficiently "motherly" towards
Anna -- she seemed more like a put-out older sister -- she does manage to
pull off a serviceable English accent.

Rose would later graduate into full-out gruesome horror with
his adaptation of a Clive Barker story in Candyman; but in Paperhouse,
he keeps the terror cerebral, where true horror resides.